Love and Marriage. And Housework.

"A soulmate is someone who appreciates your level of weird"

- Bill Murray

Am I the only one who didn’t know that it is still quite common for housework to be divided into women’s work and men’s work?

I’m not happy. 

Not least because men’s work seems to consist of bringing out the bins and mowing the lawn every couple of weeks.  And maybe keeping the cars on the road.  Women’s work, on the other hand, consists of cooking and cleaning and laundry and bathing children and endless thankless toil. 

(Not this woman’s work, I hasten to add.  I have never experienced endless toil in our house.  And I can swear I never will).

I am a lucky ducky to be married to the lovely His Nibs.  A man who would never in a million years say the words “That’s women’s work”.  He would not say these words because he doesn’t believe them.  But I’d imagine he’d be afraid to say them, even if he did.

His Nibs will clean a bathroom and washes the floors and often has a load of washing done and already flapping on the line when I get up of a morning.  He’s willing to do his half of the housework. Of course he always asks me at least three times whether the floors look well, or if I’m pleased with the condition of the bathroom, but he does it.  That’s the main thing.

I strongly suspect that he knows he’s great.  He knows that being a husband who isn’t afraid of the mop and who irons his own shirts is a good thing.  I think maybe the fact that I think he’s great, and he knows he’s great, and my friends say he’s great, is just as sexist as running a house based on women’s work and men’s work.

He recently missed a call on the phone from one of his hurling friends, a lovely man who is happily married.  When His Nibs rang back he explained that he hadn't answered because he hadn’t heard the phone, he was doing the hoovering at the time.

Apparently this man was quite tickled, and asked His Nibs what he’d done wrong to merit such a punishment?  Because it seems this man has never turned on his own hoover in his life.  I couldn’t believe it.

I admit my beloved is not beyond doing something badly in the hopes he won’t be asked to do it again. I'm not being bitchy,  I have proof.  The other day I asked him to put on a whites only wash, which he did.  And he hung it out on the line.  Here is a picture of it, in fact.

For fecks sake.  I don’t even know where he got the black socks, I’d already done the darks wash. 

It’s the same when he cleans the kitchen.  He doesn't wipe down the table or countertops and for no reason I can understand he leaves cupboard doors and drawers open all over the place.

And he’ll never hear the end of the time he put the washing up in the greenhouse.  In the halcyon days when we had a cleaner, I always used to do a quick run around the house, picking up laundry, doing the washing up, that sort of thing, before she arrived.  This was for two reasons.  One, I was ashamed to let the cleaner into the house, in its natural state.  And two, because I always wanted her to wash the fecking floors and clean the pigging bath and do all the horrible things I specifically didn’t want to do.  I didn’t want to waste the precious few hours a week when someone was actually cleaning the house.

One week, I asked for His Nibs’ assistance with the washing up part.  He objected.  I objected to his objection.  To shut me up, he swore on the dog’s life that he would wash up in the morning, before the cleaner arrived.  I was going to work the next day, and he was off.  This suited me down to the ground, since it excused me entirely from my half of the washing up.  I went to bed happy. 

When I arrived home from work that fateful day, my mother was just arriving for the weekend.  His Nibs was pottering around the garden.  He invited my mother out to the glasshouse to review the progress his tomato plants had made, and I put on the kettle.  I was puzzled to discover that although the kitchen was sparkling clean, there was almost no mugs in the cupboard.  I called His Nibs in to discuss the mystery.  My mother followed him, looking a bit shaken.  And it very quickly transpired that he had not washed up.  In fact, when he realised the cleaner was due any minute, he panicked,  fetched a large box, and packed the washing up into it.  Then he deposited it in the glasshouse, to fester in the July sun all day. 

To be fair, I’d imagine His Nibs might have a problem with the fact that while I insist that he complete household chores promptly and willingly, and he is accused of being a sexist pig if he raises any argument whatsoever, I always look completely aghast at him when he suggests that I might like to put air in the tyres of my own car.

“But I don’t know how to do that” I’ll wail.

“I’ve shown you hundreds of times”.

“But it’s so boring when you try to show me, I always lose focus.  And I’ve tried to do it myself, I swear I have.  The problem is that instead of the tyre filling up with air it all empties out.”

And then he tells me for the thousandth time that this is impossible, and I argue, and eventually he loses the will to carry on and brings my car out to check the tyres himself.

Also, I’ve never turned on our lawnmower. 

My excuse is that he loves cars and loves gardening so my doing these jobs would be tantamount to his writing my blog.  This is utter nonsense of course.

Neither of us cook, which is handy.  But His Nibs knows what the various kitchen implements are used for.

The massive and expensive balloon whisk I bought in a fancy kitchen shop in Belgium when I was going through a baking phase some years ago, was effective in the stirring of a tin of paint.

The Pyrex jug I used to use measuring ingredients was also very useful, he tells me, for measuring out motor oil.

And the sieve was very helpful the time he decided his garden was being attacked by some sort of grub.  His Nibs grows an organic garden full of flowers that attract bees and butterflies, and it’s only gorgeous. 

Because of the organic part, he can’t just start using any old chemical the garden centre sells him to get rid of any infestations.  So a full investigation was carried out.  By sieving the soil until he was proven right.  Horrible little grubs wriggled around the bottom of the sieve.  And it could never be used again.

Then there’s the glasses.  Not the wine glasses.  The ordinary glasses you use when you need a glass of water, or a glass of milk.  We have none now.  They’re all gone. 

The garden again.  Another infestation.  Slugs this time.  He used lager to catch them, in disgusting little slug traps.  Slugs like a tipple, it seems.  If you leave lager out for them they will trail around the garden until they find it, then pitch themselves into the trap.  Not a bad way to go, I suppose. His Nibs was not happy with the traps.  Giving them far too much credit in my opinion, he decided the slugs were getting too used to them.  They knew that their slug friends were going in for a drink and never coming out again.  He needed a stealthier approach.

So he took the glasses from the kitchen and buried them in the garden, so that the tops were level with the ground, before adding drink.  The idea was that, the glass being see through, the slugs wouldn’t know that it was a trap, and would throw themselves merrily in for a drink.  It worked beautifully, but now we only have wine glasses in the kitchen.

And no wooden spoons, all of which have been used up in stirring a toxic smelling fertiliser he makes from fermented nettles – don’t ask me, I haven’t a clue.

But at least someone is getting some use out of the kitchen implements I suppose.  It’s not as if I bother them much.

He has destroyed half the contents of a kitchen, but has never used any of the items destroyed for the purpose for which they were designed.  And I really don't care.

I wonder if this is normal, or just another example of how odd we’re getting the longer we stay together?